Making Professional Development Relevant

original image from http://www.eatright.org/

One of my favorite parts about becoming a more experienced teacher has been learning to lead - in both my classroom and my school - in new and innovative ways.

There's quite a bit of research out there that supports what teachers have known for a long time: lecture-based professional development, much like most lecture-based teaching, flat-out doesn't work. Especially if the content doesn't directly relate to teachers' classrooms. This becomes a colossal waste of time and money for both the school districts and the teachers.

  

21st-Century Professional Development:

As we move further into a new century, models of effective 21st-Century professional development are emerging. Some recommendations from Tech & Learning include:

1. Workshops that focus on real need...
2. ... and real uses of technology.
3. Learning that is sustained and collegial.
4. Building online communities.
5. Models and mentors.
6. Learning from case studies.

And while I like Tech & Learning's focus on technology integration, I also think that these recommendations line up fairly well with a model that's been in place for a while - that of teacher-inquiry groups.

The Basics of a Teacher-Inquiry Group:

Each teacher becomes involved voluntarily (being pressed into professional-development service doesn't work for this model), and they become part of a group of teachers who are interested in researching a teaching question in their own classrooms. For example, an eighth-grade reading teacher might be interested in seeing how the use of reading and writing workshop in his classroom two days a week might impact his students' writing abilities.

After developing a research question, the teacher creates a teacher-scholar project that would help him/her answer that question. Our eighth-grade reading teacher's question could be something along the lines of "What impact, if any, does the use of reading/writing workshop have on my students' writing?" In order to answer this question, he could collect student writing samples from before, during, and after the period of time that he incorporated the reading/writing workshop into his classroom, whether that's a two-week unit or over the course of the semester or year.

Throughout the semester or year, the teachers involved in the inquiry group meet to discuss what they're observing in their classrooms and what they're learning about their research questions. Groups sometimes meet however many times they determine will be effective, and they often work their way through each person's project in turn. They provide encouragement and support for each other, and they also serve as experts or resources that can be used to develop each others' research in meaningful ways. So, if our eighth-grade reading teacher brought a question about evaluating multimodal student writing samples - perhaps related to writing qualities that should be evaluated - another teacher-scholar could direct him to a resource for P-12 teachers that would help him consider his options.

At the end of the year, teacher-inquiry groups often go on a writing retreat together. These writing retreats vary in length - some are as short as an afternoon, while others span an entire weekend - but their goals remain consistent: to provide a space for teacher-scholars to write and reflect over their classroom research. Often, teacher-scholars will write for several hours, then meet with their inquiry groups to get feedback or to simply touch base. At the end of the writing retreat, many teacher-scholars will have written articles for their district newsletters, graduate courses, school websites, or professional journals. In the case of our eighth-grade reading teacher, he wrote and submitted an article for his professional journal. Of course.

For more information about creating your own teacher-inquiry group, check out these books:

The Art of Classroom Inquiry: A Handbook for Teacher-Researchers (Hubbard & Power)
The Power of Questions: A Guide to Teacher and Student Research (Falk & Blumenreich)
Teacher-Researchers at Work (MacLean & Mohr)